Although Iíve already tested at least 2 phones that have Ice Cream Sandwich
on them natively (the Galaxy Nexus
and the Galaxy S III) Iíd not
tested version 4.0 of the Android operating system on my own
Samsung Galaxy S II LTE until
just recently. I could have installed a leaked copy of ICS some months ago, but
I didnít want to bias my opinion by using a version that might not have been
fully functional, or might have had bugs. Once Rogers and Samsung released the
official copy of 4.0.4 of Ice Cream Sandwich on the 20th of June (2012) I felt
that it was high time I gave it a try.

Please bear in mind that this article is not a review of Ice Cream Sandwich in
general, but rather a critique of the specific version made available for use on
the Samsung Galaxy S II LTE from Rogers. More specifically itís a look at how it
differs from the stock copy of Gingerbread that the phone originally came with.

Before I did anything however, I installed a copy of
ClockworkMod on my phone so that I
could make a Nandroid Backup of it. That gave me a snapshot of my Gingerbread
O/S that I could use to restore my phone to exactly where it had been in the
event that I didnít want to continue with ICS indefinitely. I should interject
at this point that I highly recommend you take this step before you make any
changes to your phone. If anything goes wrong, or you arenít completely
satisfied with the changes you make, then a Nandroid Backup is a lifesaver.

For full instructions on installing ClockworkMod on your phone, see the
following page:

The installation process went smoothly and ICS upgraded my existing apps when it
initially booted. I was surprised to find that
LauncherPro was still my default launcher, just as it had been on
Gingerbread, though I found the launcher a little bit more sluggish on ICS. As
far as the native launcher was concerned however, I was quite shocked to find
that Samsung had not included TouchWiz 4.0 (as found on the S III). I donít
really care for TouchWiz 3.0, and so a 3rd-party launcher is always the way to
go for me.

I therefore downloaded a copy of
Nova, which is a 3rd-party launcher written specifically for ICS. Nova
provides an experience that is very similar to the native ICS launcher (as found
on the Galaxy Nexus). It ran smoothly and it didnít seem the least bit sluggish.
I therefore spent about an hour setting it up with my personal preferences and
all went well.

So, everything was off an excellent start and it seemed highly likely that Iíd
stick with Ice Cream Sandwich and enjoy it immensely. However, the more I played
with it, the more disillusioned I became. Iíd come from a version of Gingerbread
that had been working exceptionally well, in that it was fast, very responsive,
and as stable as the
Rock of Gibraltar. ICS had to live up to this standard, but in many ways it
failed to do so.

Letís first look at the issue of smoothness, which youíll find many people
discussing when it comes to ICS vs Gingerbread. Google has finally written the
U/I to use hardware acceleration. I therefore expected liquid-smooth scrolling
performance on par with iOS or Windows Phone, but what I got was a very mixed
bag. At low velocities the smoothness of lists was indeed up to the standards of
Apple, and as an added bonus Google dialed in slower, more gradual, deceleration
to make that smoothness more obvious. However, when lists are flung quickly,
many of them fail to retain that smoothness and become jerky. Even more so than
they had been in Gingerbread.

So, while the improvement at low speeds is a welcome sight, the jerkiness at
extremely high speeds (more so in apps that donít yet use hardware acceleration)
is very off-putting. I went to the Developer options and I forced the use of
hardware acceleration, but doing so caused some apps to misbehave (such as
Rainy Days and
Flipboard
for example). Even ignoring the misbehaving apps, I didnít find that the
improvement was quite as dramatic as Iíd expected and lists still remained jerky
when they were flung quickly.

However, Iíd have to say that overall the graphics experience under ICS is
better than under Gingerbread, but only in an evolutionary way, and not
dramatically as one might have expected. Had the improvement been all positive
however, Iíd have gladly welcomed it, but the inconsistency (the jerkiness at
high scroll speeds) nullified the smooth low-speed scrolling for me.

The next thing I did was to look around for a new compelling feature in the O/S
that I didnít have in Gingerbread. I read through the list of new features found
in ICS and there were quite a few of them. However, none of them was a
game-changer and many (for me at least) were completely irrelevant or already
provided via 3rd-party apps. One of the big changes promised in ICS is a better
camera experience, but as far as I could tell the camera app provided in this
version of ICS is identical to the one in Gingerbread and the speed of the
camera is completely unchanged.

Iím a big fan of the Swype keyboard and the
newest beta with built-in Dragon Dictation is beyond fabulous. However, Swype
doesnít work particularly well under ICS in the S II LTE and is noticeably
sluggish, especially when you choose to tap keys rather than swipe them. Even
the stock Samsung keyboard doesnít have the lightning-fast reflexes it did under
Gingerbread, though itís certainly far less sluggish than Swype. Iíve read quite
a few comments from disgruntled S II LTE owners over the sluggishness of
keyboard input, but before I made any judgments I completely uninstalled Swype,
rebooted the phone, and then reinstalled the keyboard to see if that made any
difference, but it didnít. I also tried clearing the Dalvik Cache, but that
didnít help either.

Throughout my tests I suffered from a number of force-closes, and to make
matters worse they were painfully slow. Way back when I bought my first Android
phone (the Samsung Galaxy S Captivate) I found that on …clair whenever crashes
occurred the phone would lock up for about 15 to 20 seconds and THEN the
force-close box would pop up and the phone returned to normal. This went away
with the release of Froyo and had never been a problem on Gingerbread either.
However, that appears the behavior is back.

It was suggested that many of the crashes would go away if I wiped all the data
and did a factory reset. This theory is supported by the fact that Howard Chui
reported to me (when he loaned me the S III to test) that it crashed all the
time. However, after the phone had been restored to factory freshness, I never
had a problem with crashes when I tested the S III.

Throughout my testing I found that apps (including the Nova launcher) sometimes
had to reinitialize. This used to be a problem on my old
Galaxy S Captivate, because
512 MB of RAM just wasnít enough to ensure that most things you wanted to
survive in RAM wouldnít be killed by the O/S when space was needed. When the S
II moved to 1 GB of RAM the problem went away. I looked into the reason for this
behavior and I discovered that ICS uses up a lot more RAM than Gingerbread (by
my estimates, about 200 to 250 MB more). Samsung made the right decision to
include 2 GB of RAM in the S III, because clearly 1 GB is not optimal amount for
ICS.

I frequently use a Samsung embedded app called Service Monitor, which allows me
to make changes to the radio not supported in the Android menus (such as forced
LTE-only for example), or displaying field test information. These features are
usually accessed by typing special secret codes into the dialer (such as
*#0011# or *#2263#). Service Monitor still exists in ICS
and it still does all the same things. However, Samsung as broken the app in
that it doesnít display the correct screen when first entered and none of the
apparent menu items used to exit the app work at all. The only way to exit is to
press the Home key, but that leaves Service Monitor running (and needlessly
using up that precious RAM).

For some reason the touch screen just wasnít as sensitive as it had been before.
When Iíd owned the Captivate I was used to the screen not being super-sensitive,
but when I got the S II LTE that all changed. With Gingerbread installed the
touch sensitivity on the screen is pure magic. It was lightning fast, super
responsive, and always a joy to use. Once Iíd installed ICS the screen still
worked just fine, but I found myself have to retouch things quite often to get
the phone to react. Perhaps this was a deliberate de-tuning of touch
sensitivity, but regardless I found it as annoying as the other issues Iíve
outlined thus far.

In the end the weight of all those annoyances, as well as the nagging feeling
that the phone was more sluggish, finally got the better of me and I used my
Nandroid Backup to quickly return the phone not only to Gingerbread, but to
exactly the state it had been in just before Iíd installed ICS. Everything
worked exactly as I remembered it and I was happy again.

Now the takeaway from this article shouldnít be that Ice Cream Sandwich on the
Samsung Galaxy S II LTE is a complete waste of time. Some people have reported
not suffering from some of the issues Iíd outlined here, and not all of the
annoyances are going to be annoying to everyone. But with the ease at which you
can restore your phone using Nandroid Backup, there really isnít a defensible
reason why you shouldnít at least give ICS a try and see for yourself.

However, at the end of the day, ask yourself what youíve gained by moving to the
new O/S and what youíve lost. If the pluses outweigh the minuses, then by all
means stick with ICS. However, I suspect youíll find that the minuses outweigh
the pluses (even if things donít work out the same for you as they did for me).

For me at least, ICS has come across like the Android equivalent of VISTA, or
more to the point, Gingerbread seems to be the Android equivalent of XP. Iíll
sticking with Gingerbread for now, but perhaps once the official release of
Cyanogenmod 9 becomes available (it
may be out by the time you read this) Iíll give ICS another try.